Realism, anti-realism in 20th-century literature : [... workshop organized by the editors as part of the XVIIth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), which took place in Hong Kong, 8-15 August 2004

Modernist literature and art have been dominated by a disinterest in mere empirical and social reality and a discontent with habitualized perception and the world-view of convention, reason, and pragmatism. This anti-realistic attitude originated in the epistemological scepticism of the early 20th century which was even radicalized by the advent of the »linguistic turn«, constructivism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism. Yet it would be a gross simplification to describe the 20th century flatly and globally as an age of anti-realism. Especially in its second half many neo-realist movements were launched, and non-Western literatures (e.g. »magic realism«) challenged Western modernity and its constructivist epistemology. Today, we can not only read many texts which might be attributed to a »postmodernist realism« but may even be watching the rise of a post-postmodernist realism. This vast field of research is discussed in a series of theoretical reflections and case studies of selected texts, movies and the internet which geographically embrace Europe, the USA, Africa and Asia. The volume may be of interest for students and scholars of Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, and Media Studies as well as for students and experts in the cultures, authors and artists that are covered in the collection of essays. Content: Introduction / Christine Baron, Manfred Engel -- Réalisme et antiréalisme : une généalogie complexe / Christine Baron -- Égalité de la mimesis et de l'antimimesis : quelques notes sur le paradoxe de l'institution de l'œuvre / Jean Bessière -- "Laquelle est la vraie?" : La parole hybride de la poésie / Sieghild Bogumil-Notz -- Forms and functions of anti-realism in the literature of high modernism (Woolf, Proust, Kafka) / Manfred Engel -- Anti-realism and the Livre de peintre : from symbolism to surrealism / Micéala Symington -- Le surréalisme comme réalisme ouvert / Timo Kaitaro -- "À la recherche de la réalité perdue" : ambiguous alliances between literature and photography (P. Härtling, C. Nooteboom, M. Vargas Llosa, M. Beyer) / Monika Schmitz-Emans -- Gilles Deleuze and Italian neorealism : the irruption of the virtual / Alberto Hernández-Lemus -- Social action as neo-realistic discourse in Nikos Kazantzákis's The last temptation of Christ (1960) / Nathan P. Devir -- Realism and fantasy in novels by Kubin, Raspail, and Cărtărescu / Virgil Nemoianu -- Magic and realism : the tribal imagination in Louise Erdrich's novels / Rose Hsiu-li Juan -- La littérature romanesque d'Afrique noire francophone entre réalisme, postcolonialisme et postmodernisme / Tumba Shango Lokoho -- Realism as efficacy : on the tectonics of texts in the web / Holger Schulze.